For electronic communication, media and message types are often used which are stored temporarily or otherwise in a memory assigned to the respective recipient, and are retrieved by this recipient by accessing the respective memory. It is thus usual, for example, that users of an email service set up a connection now and then by means of an electronic communication device (PC, PDA, mobile phone or similar) to a corresponding message server (email server, unified messaging system or similar) to find out whether new electronic messages have arrived and been temporarily stored. As well as the email messages, this also applies in a similar way to fax messages, which are temporarily stored in corresponding fax servers or unified messaging servers, and to other electronic messages.
The regular accessing of a message server for the purpose of checking whether a new message may be present is often irksome and time-consuming. This is all the more true in the cases where a user is waiting urgently for the arrival of a message, so that he is obliged to check at very short intervals, so accordingly frequently.
To remedy this, it is known for example for the unified messaging systems to notify the relevant user (recipient of an electronic message) automatically in each case as soon as there is a new message for him. For this purpose, such servers have a facility, for example, which makes an automatically generated call to a number previously input by the user. The user is then informed about the delivery of a new electronic message, by means of a synthetically generated voice output for example. This method is often also referred to in the literature as “user outcall”.
Analogously to the described method of “user outcall”, known message servers are also able to execute a corresponding notification by means of a short message (SMS message; SMS=Short Message Service) over a mobile radio network.